"We can't allow things that are inaccurate to stand." — The Word of Our Dan, February 19, 2008.

Friday, November 23, 2012

149 + 29 = 244

On Friday, the opposition Liberals released a heavily-redacted copy of a report entitled “Job Evaluation Systems Project”, obtained under the provincial Access to Information Act. (Big PDF file here.)

A typical page of the report looks like this one (selected at random):

The blacked-out bits are the redactions, passages that the responding department felt justified to exclude from the document release based on one or more provisions of the Act. Those provisions are cited in the little call-out boxes. In this case, all of the redactions were justified on the basis of s. 24(1)(c) through (e) of the Act.

In total, there were 227 instances where one or more paragraphs of one particular sub-section of the Act were cited to justify one or more redactions of material in the release. (Some citations applied to multiple blocks of blacked-out text.)

There are 149 pages in the document. Some of them consist of the single word, “Deloitte”.

That very popular sub-section is 24(1).

Sub-section 24(1) of the Act, as amended, was legislated in June as part of Bill 29.

There are a further 13 redactions which are justified on the basis of ss. 20(1) of the Act.

Sub-section 20(1) of the Act, as amended, was legislated as part of Bill 29.

There are another three redactions justified on the basis of s. 18 of the Act, as amended.

You guessed it: s. 18 was repealed and replaced with an entirely new section as part of Bill 29.

There do not seem to be any other sections of the Act cited as justification for any other redactions, and no section which has survived unamended from pre-Bill 29 days.

There is one redaction on p. 138 which is not attributed to any provision of the Act.

With that one possible exception, every single one of the 244+ redactions, in a 149-page document – including, in many cases, redactions to section tables of contents – is justified on the basis of one or more provisions of Bill 29.